Set for success: Daniela pt. 1
A ten-year-long relationship will define anybody. Mine was my first real relationship, the one where I learned all my lessons of how to treat a partner, how to live with someone, and how to love someone. By the time it was all over, it had compiled nearly a third of my life, and most of my adulthood.
Most of my good habits around women all came down to my relationship with my long-term ex-girlfriend, Daniela. She’d either built or reinforced so many good behaviours in me after such a long time and had really shaped my positive views on other people.
Unfortunately, she was also the main reason for so many of my insecurities; around nerdiness, around confidence, and especially around self-worth. She had good and bad, like all of us. But understanding and reflecting on how I got from point A of knowing her to point B of separating from her told me a lot about how to move forward and make a connection that was more real than what had come before.
I’d met Daniela for the first time way back in 2009. I was 22 and we were both taking a documentary film class at university. For the second class, we were all given cameras and told to “film anything” for three hours, whereby we would come back and take our footage and learn about cutting and editing film. Everyone else went off and began filming on their own, but the two of us spent those whole three hours together talking (ie. me relentlessly flirting with her) and getting to know each other. For the rest of the course, we saw a lot of documentaries and worked on making our own too. We’d continue to take film classes together and would rent and go out to see movies all the time. Our first official date was to a movie, where we had the choice of a movie we’d never heard of (and no one else had either) called Lymelife, a softer comedy-drama about a family dealing with Lyme disease, or Angels & Demons a standard Hollywood blockbuster sequel to The Da Vinci Code. We chose Angels & Demons, and for years later we’d joke about how we always should have seen Lymelife instead. (Even more years later, we finally saw Lymelife and we stopped making that joke as much… turns out both options weren’t great.)
Film became a central part of our lives. We both majored in film for our bachelor of arts degrees. When she was nervous about calling me her boyfriend, she settled on “film friend” and we kept that term later as a running joke. We’d cuddle up and watch films together, initially by going out to rent DVDs together, which eventually evolved into choosing one on Netflix. I was still doing a little bit of film acting, so I’d happily share my on-set stories. Daniela would sometimes submit for community film festivals like the One-Take Super 8, or we’d just find ourselves helping out with friends’ short films.
I eventually started to phase out of that aspect in my professional life though, and went back to school to get a diploma in communications. Daniela had paid her own way through school, and was now either on set in the props department (I even once volunteered some of my childhood action figures when she needed them as props for one movie… not realizing they would be getting ruined and I would not get them back!) or taking many late-night serving shifts to get some money. She’d been living with a roommate for a few years by this point, but by the end of my last semester, she asked me to move in with her. I had been hesitant to do so. I had a cushy gig living at my parents' rent-free and casually working only one day a week. She was upset that I wasn’t more eager to move in with her, even though I had agreed. I was just worried. It was a big change, but it was time.
We were moving into an apartment on the top floor of a building she was already in. That room was empty, so they’d allowed us to slowly put things in there before the official moving day. I came by one night when she was working late and thought I’d surprise her. As a gesture to really show that I was ready to live together, I unpacked all the plates and forks and cups and other kitchen stuff and began setting up our kitchen to be liveable. She walked in just as I was finishing and saw what I was doing. She flipped out at me right away. Apparently, unpacking these items was important to her, in a sort of rite-of-passage type of way. These were the first new dishware she’d had to call her own. She also wanted to have a say in deciding where in the kitchen they went and I’d taken that away from her. I was so flabbergasted. I kept trying to defend myself and say I was trying to do a nice thing for her. It was probably just “new roommate jitters,” but I never really understood what I did wrong.
Eventually, I graduated from my communications program and got a couple of very crappy jobs. In 2014, a fresh face like mine doing communications work for local retailers meant loooots of boring Facebook posts. “This is on sale,” “Here’s our stockroom,” “Happy international talk like a pirate day, come see arrr’ store.” Fucking kill me. It was the sort of uninspired bullshit that artificial intelligence will eventually take over. Fortunately, I soon found an incredible job where I wouldn’t have to do any of that, at Tourism Winnipeg. I’d actually get the chance to write, do media relations, and not feel like I was selling my soul — or selling anything! At least not directly. Now I could sell an idea, a concept, the joy of visiting our city and seeing the amazing features we had to offer. I was thrilled.
Unfortunately, that was exactly when Daniela got fired from her serving gig. Some uptight customer lodged a complaint and management decided to fire her. I was heartbroken for her. She had made so many friends at that restaurant. I knew it was an important part of her social life on top of being a means to get quick cash. And no one likes getting fired. The feelings of shame and guilt are impossible to keep at bay. But it happened, and though she still had her on-set jobs, those were much less consistent than serving. You were at the mercy of the local film industry, waiting patiently for movies and TV shows to come here, then working yourself to near death for the month or so that they were here, and finally going back to waiting for the phone to ring for the next opportunity.
I consoled her as much as I could and breathed a sigh of relief that my new job came with a decent raise to help support us. A couple of weeks later, Daniela came to me with an idea. Someone she’d met in the film industry had a gig for her with even more prestige in the set department, as an on-set dresser. This was a great credit and would go far toward getting her the required hours to get into the union. The only issue… it was in Toronto. For three months.
I could see how excited she was at the prospect of this. It was important to her career, it was fulfilling something inside of her, and it was giving her the opportunity to be more independent which she, of course, thrived at, even if she didn’t always realize it. Yes, it meant three months away from each other. But the opportunity seemed too good to pass up. We shared one car, which she would need, so we had to come up with a plan. My job was only a one-year contract, as it was covering maternity leave, but I was entitled to some vacation time. We figured I’d use up some of it for this. We’d pack a bunch of stuff up for her to keep for her whole stay, drive through the States, stop for one night in Madison, Wisconsin, and one night in London, Ontario. Then off to Toronto, where I’d stay a bit to get her acclimated, see the city, and spend some time together. Then I’d fly back alone and she would start working her tail off. I’d visit her once in the middle of her excursion for a fun check-in. Finally, I would fly back one last time at the end of the three months, and we would drive back home together, through the States and back to Winnipeg.
It was exciting and stressful. But I was so proud of her for taking her future into her own hands and knew she’d be fantastic. The big day came and we drove out on our journey. Madison was cooler than we expected and we made lots of memories along the way. Once I was in Toronto with her and I met her production manager, I felt even better. He had a supportive wife and kid and talked about this wild invention he had engineered that would make him millions very soon (so he said). I didn’t know how seriously to take that, but he was eccentric in a fun way and he seemed like a very good dude who would look out for her and have her best interests in mind while they were working. The show they’d be working on was a true crime series, where they’d be recreating real-life crimes and making them look as authentic as possible.
That first time going to the airport to leave her alone in Toronto was so tough. It was an early flight and we stayed up late as we just held each other. It would be the longest time not seeing one another since we’d first met. There was a lot of sadness but it was mixed with swirls of anticipation and hope that this might be an incredible experience for her.
Once I was back home, we did a video call every night. I heard all her stories from the set, filled in how my new job was going, and tried to make things feel as normal as possible.
There was a small hiccup a few weeks in. You see, Daniela was a total plant lover. Indoor plants, outdoor plants, she loved to take care of them. She’d make little “snips” of plants and put them in her “propagation station” and give those out as gifts. Or she’d take little snips of plants from friends and propagate them at our place and plant them once they were ready to go. Even the way she said “snip,” you could just feel her love. “Looks at this little snip,” “should I give her this snip for her birthday,” “ooh, my little snip is growing so well!” Soon I was saying “little snip” all the time too, eventually including it as one my dozen or so pet names for her (little beet, papita, bonita, cutie, beauty… there were many!).
Summer was ending though, and temperatures were dropping. Daniela wanted to make sure all her plants on the balcony would be protected. This was our first year with a balcony and she was feeling anxious about losing her balcony plants to frost. She said I needed to buy burlap and put that over the plants to protect them. A couple days later when I’d bought the burlap and showed her, she was less than thrilled.
I had taken a sheet of burlap and wrapped that around the whole corner of our balcony where five or six plants were huddled together. Daniela generally viewed me as pretty intelligent, but when it came to some things (usually domestic ones) I did not know what I was doing. And when I made a big mistake, she’d remark how much I was like Amelia Bedelia, misconstruing things and making unintentional messes. It wasn’t mean-spirited, it was gentle teasing, but I always got so embarrassed anyway. It reinforced my sheltered middle-class upbringing and I hated that. I liked being competent and capable for her.
But the burlap was not remotely acceptable. I had to get some for each individual plant and wrap them all with their own sheet with the proper love and care that she would show them. Which wouldn’t seem like that big of a deal on the surface (and easy enough to fix after I’d screwed it up the first time). But Daniela was getting very frustrated with this. Obviously, the toll of being away, completely on her own with no safety net was tough and me not taking care of her plants was not helping.
But we soldiered on and things got better, especially because I was going to be flying in soon to see her for a quick weekend trip.
It was a two-hour flight early in the morning yet I was wide awake and amped up the whole time, jostling my leg up and down while the indie rock blared through my headphones and not letting the man snoring in the seat beside me distract me in any way. We landed, I grabbed my bag and eagerly speed-walked my way through the airport. It had been 45 days since we’d seen each other, and I didn’t want to wait another second.
Finally, as I rounded a corner where the public was waiting for the arrivals, we locked eyes. A smile like I’d never seen erupted over her face as she full-on sprinted over to me. I opened my arms to hug her like I usually did, but she grabbed me first and kissed me so passionately in front of everyone in the terminal you would have thought I just returned from an eight-month tour in Iraq. I had never been kissed like that before and it would be impossible to recreate. It’s like the difference between when you watch clips of the most amazing goals scored in a sport versus watching championship-winning goals scored. An NHL player can deke out defenders in a way that blows your mind, but watching someone score the most basic overtime goal to win the Stanley Cup will always get a bigger reaction. And everyone would take the latter every time. I’ll never forget that Stanley Cup-winning kiss.
We quickly stopped at a grocery store to grab some essentials and found a big variety pack of four or five different “fun” types of condoms (like ones with bumps all over them, another with spiral ribs, that sort of thing) that was on sale and it was the last box left. “It’s a sign!” she said, as we agreed to try every type of condom in the box like two horny teenagers.
We whisked off to an AirBnB after that and were all over each other for the whole weekend. It was incredible and loving and filled with laughs and memories. Then on the last night, we went for a walk. And after three straight days of love and relief and positivity… she broke down sobbing in front of me.
“It’s just so hard!” she cried.
“I know. I know,” I said instantly, not even sure what specifically hard thing she meant, since there were many. But I tried to reassure her anyway as I held her close to me.
“But you’re doing so amazing!”
The work was hard. The distance was hard. But I think what was really hard was that she saw that this was a potential path that she could go down for the rest of her life, and she didn’t like the look of it. Was this her calling? She’d be grinding it out on set at the bottom rung and working from production to production all to say she worked in the arts. Which I knew was important to her. Her friends were artists. She was so artistic. But did this job make her an artist? Did it inspire her and make her happy? She was good at it and thrived in the problem-solving nature of it all, but this didn’t seem like some revelatory awakening that this was what she was meant to do.
Seeing Daniela cry was always the worst thing in the world for me to see. It didn’t happen often, but when it did I felt like I would do anything to make her happy and stop her from crying more. I remember her failing her driver’s test for the seventh time and breaking down in the car. I remember her tweaking her injured knee after she stepped on a dumbbell after we worked out together in our apartment. This time, I held her close and told her I’d support her no matter what. I didn’t even really know what I meant. I just wanted her to get through this. I kissed her cheeks and said to her that it was almost over, and soon we would be home and we could figure out whatever next step to take.
We stayed up all night yet again as we held each other until I finally had to take a bus to the airport. We counted down the weeks until it was over, continuing to talk every day. She told me how conflicted she was feeling, going through murder scenes and picking over people’s traumas like vultures so they could find the closest possible olive green hat a killer wore before he murdered a young family or locate the right shade of wood for the side table where a woman’s head was smashed open by her ex-lover. She said it felt gross and I could see she was expending a lot of emotional energy.
We also tried to incorporate some sexiness over the phone, which involved me sending my first dick pic. A true millennial rite of passage. We’d always vaguely talked about sending nudes, more as a funny idea, but now I thought the time was right. After I sent it, I waited three hours (an eternity based on our texting habits) with no response thinking I had greatly offended her. I felt like such an idiot. She clearly thought I was a typical horny man and was severely disappointed in me.
She finally responded with a mix of shock and amusement. Evidently, I sent it right before she went with a friend to see a movie, so couldn’t check her phone. Seeing it now though, my out-of-context cock was a quaint reminder of what was at home, but it was not any sort of turn-on. Pretty understandable. We saved our phone intimacy for our loving conversations over Facetime instead.
The end of this experiment finally came and I flew into Toronto for the last time to head back to Winnipeg. There would be no packing or last-minute issues — the car was stuffed with all her belongings and we were to head straight home right from the airport. It was over. She’d conquered her adventure in Toronto and it was time to leave.
We high-tailed it home, hitting a winter storm along the way which turned our eight-hour drive into 13 hours when we finally made it to Rockford, Illinois and our Extended Stay America hotel. Unfortunately, we went to the other Extended Stay America hotel in the gigantic hotel megaplex, when we actually needed to go that one over there, directly across the parking lot from this Extended Stay America, as the concierge told us in a way that said she had to make this speech forty times a day.
But by the next night, we were home. We were together again. My contract would be ending soon, and Daniela was at the precipice of what the next chapter of her life would look like. More film sets? Or a whole new direction? Either way, I’d do my best to support her.
